‘And what happened?’ J asked.

‘They waited and planned.’ Her voice was lowered, the two men leaned forward to hear her, there was something fearful in the way the three white faces went closer together, and her voice dropped to a haunting whisper. ‘They waited and planned and at eight o’clock one morning – Good Friday morning they chose in their blasphemy – all over the country they came out of the bushes, to each little farm, to each little family, to each lone man, they came out and struck us dead. They planned to kill every single one of us without a word of warning reaching the others. And they’d have done it too; but for one little turncoat Indian boy who told his master that he had been ordered to kill him, and the man ran to Jamestown and raised the alarm.’

‘What happened?’

‘They opened the arsenal at Jamestown and called the settlers in. Everyone who was near enough came in and the town was saved, but up and down the river, in every isolated farmhouse, there was a white man and woman with their skull staved in by a stone axe.’

She turned her bleak face to J. ‘My husband’s head was cleaved in two, with an axe of stone,’ she said. ‘My little boy was stabbed through the heart with an arrow head of shell. They came against us without proper weapons, they came against us with reeds and shells and stones. It was like the land itself rose up and struck at us.’

There was a long silence.

She rose from the table and stacked the bowls, callous again. ‘That’s why I have no time for even the smallest girl of theirs,’ she said. ‘They are like stones and reeds and trees to me. I hate every stone and reed and tree in this land, and I hate every one of them. I hate them to their death and destruction. This land will never be home for me until everyone of them is gone.’

‘How many of us died?’ J asked. He said ‘us’ without thinking. This was a war of the dark forests against the white men; of course he counted himself among the planters.

‘Not quite four hundred,’ she said bitterly. ‘Four hundred men and women who wanted nothing more than to live in peace in a little part of a great great land. And then the hunger came.’

‘Hunger?’

‘We had to leave the crops in the field, we were too afraid to bring them in,’ she explained. ‘We all crowded into Jamestown and manned the guns over the wooden walls. It was a bitter winter, and there wasn’t enough to eat. And we couldn’t trade with them as we usually did. We had always traded with them for their winter stores, they always had plenty and they always sold to us. But now we were at war with the very people who had fed us.’

J waited for more.